


hero

by tsunderestorm



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-01
Updated: 2016-08-01
Packaged: 2018-07-28 14:42:55
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,008
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7645027
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/tsunderestorm/pseuds/tsunderestorm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Steve will come.</p>
<p>Steve is coming.</p>
<p>He will save him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	hero

Outfitted with a shining metal arm, he gets thrown in a metal cage. The bars are thick, but he thinks that he could bend them if they didn’t have tiny currents of white-hot electricity coursing through them. He’s non-compliant, combative, erratic. They say the words out loud as they write them in a red journal with a black star and it pleases him to think that Hydra is so disorganized that they couldn’t even match the star he wears on his left arm to the star on the journal. The inverted colors make him laugh, they seem so ludicrous. He thinks of Steve’s star, shining silver, and of the wings he wore on the left shoulder of his jacket.

“You better turn tail and run,” he snarls when they come to get him, once. Sharp teeth and raw voice, the animal they want him to be. “Because when they come for me, you’re dead.”

He is no longer self-conscious about being rescued. No longer resentful deep down in a dark part of his heart beneath the gratitude, the awe, the pure unfiltered fucking love that he feels. When he’d woken up from hazy drug-dreams and the only person who’d ever mattered any was kneeling above him he’d been surprised and a little sad - by the looks of it, his little fighter didn’t need him any longer and jesus, that had scared him. More than the needles, more than the Hydra guards. More than dying on a table covered in his own sweat and blood and piss and shame, Steve feeling like he needed to be the one to protect him terrified him.

But Steve Rogers isn’t like he used to be. He can protect him, because love is a two-way street, not a Do-Not-Enter one-direction road and if you can protect your best guy then he can damn sure protect you, too. He isn’t all bird-boned wrists that can’t lift an especially heavy grocery bag, lungs that rattle and a heart that thumps double-time when he gets anxious. He is big, and broad, and strong; shines like there’s a halo above that head of perfect blond hair and he’s Bucky’s hero now, after all, the way he’d confessed Bucky had always been his. He’ll come.

“No one is coming for you, James.” 

Zola’s voice is adenoidal, thickly accented and obnoxious. Bucky swears he’s the scientist is the first one he’ll kill. Wrap his fist (the new one, for good measure) around his doughy neck and squeeze until his eyes pop out and he hears the death rattle escape his starved lungs. Zola, because it’s been twice now that he’s been strapped in and experimented on by this creep. But somehow, the fact that history is repeating itself is soothing, in its own fucked-up way: the last time Zola had him, an avenging angel came and saved him.

“You are the new fist of Hydra.”

“Fuck you.” Bucky spits, literally. It earns him the butt of a pistol against his temple and it would be enough to knock out a normal man, he knows. He’s not normal any longer. They’ve filled his veins with something like what Steve had gotten, he thinks, let it snake through them and spread all over. He’s been healing faster, has been since the first needle had bitten into his vein; he thinks sharper and feels stronger. They throw him in his cage when they’re done fine-tuning his arm and he thinks about too-white teeth and eyes like maps of the world, blue speckled with green.

He doesn’t believe them when they say no one is coming, repeated over and over. He refuses to. His world is pain and bitter fucking freezing cold but he refuses to give up that one hope. He’s not sure if it’s been hours since he fell, or if it’s been days, months, years. Steve will come charging in, throwing that shield like a frisbee in Central Park and Bucky will feel needed again and maybe, he thinks, he’ll grab Steve by the collar and tug him in for a kiss because Hydra already fucking knows that too, somehow. He hears them talking in hushed tones, this is not only Captain America’s closest friend but his lover, too. Bucky wonders if he still talks in his sleep, or if he’s just that stupidly, obviously in love.

Steve will come. Steve is coming. Steve will save him.

“Oh, to see the things we’re going to do to you,” one of his handlers says as he shoves him backwards into a chair. Tipped back, like the ones at the dentist’s. Bucky wonders if he’s to be given a cyanide capsule in a back molar, like the rest of the Hydra goons. 

If so, he thinks, I’ll never bite it. Because if he does, Steve will march up to heaven or down to hell, wherever Bucky gets sent to and he’ll drag him back hollerin’ the whole time and ask why didn’t you wait for me, jerk? I’ll always come for you. ‘Til the end of the line, remember? You can’t go without me.

“It would have broken your Captain’s heart.” Bucky’s blood freezes in his veins. Something is wrong about the way he’d said it, the tense. Past, like there’s no Steve to speak of any longer. There’s blood dripping from his forehead into his eyes, stinging; blood flowing freely from a split lip and his head feels fuzzy again, like it had on the table. “What a shame that his heart stopped beating one week ago, when he buried his plane in the ice.”

Bucky has no fight left any longer and his shoulders sag, arm whirs slightly as the plates move to accommodate the new position of his hand - no longer fisted on the chair’s arm, instead hanging limply. 

Steve won’t come. Steve isn’t coming. Steve can’t save him, this time.

The last thought he has, selfishly, as Bucky before he is re-born as Soldat is that at least it took a plane crash to keep Steve from him.


End file.
